November 2026 | Under Pressure

Om Namah Sivaya
Blessed Self,

Remembering our Guru, Swami Vishnudevananda, we feel inspired. His mission was always find ways to help society, whether through his authentic teachings to find health and peace, or through his charity initiatives to help the poor and those in need.

This November marks 33 years since Swamiji left his physical body, and the year 2027 will mark 100 years since his birth. We have already begun hosting a series of centenary events and celebrations. As part of this programme we are conducting a Bhagavata Saptaha from November 1 to 7 with a large Sadhu Bhandara on November 9 at our ashram in Netala. As part of this programme we distribute winter survival kits to the local Sadhus living in the Himalayan mountains. All are welcome to take part in this special events. Please contact the Netala Ashram for details.

This year the Yoga Vacation guest numbers in all our ashrams is unusually high, and course participant numbers have risen as well due to improved visa conditions for seekers of Yoga, meditation and Ayurveda in India.

We attribute all of this to Master and Swamiji, whose vision was to bring the teachings to the masses, especially when there is constant turbulence in the world. They felt that the traditional teachings were the way to bring peace.

We are pleased to report that 650 people joined our recent In the Name of Peace online satsang from around the world. This has encouraged us to conduct once a month Swami Vishnudevananda Sandesha Satsangs where I will join our various Ashrams and Centres. These are free for all to join from around the world on Zoom. Our intention is to bring the much-needed practice of satsang into peoples’ lives once a month, so they may feel connected with other like-minded people and reinforce the message of Unity in Diversity. Visit our Centenary webpage for registration information: sivanandayoga.org/vishnuswami100/

All of our Centers and Ashrams, as well as their staff are doing well by the grace of Master and Swamiji.

May Master and Swamiji’s blessings be with you always.

Pranams,
Prahlada
Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Ashrams & Centres, India

Nov 8 to Dec 5, 2026
Neyyar Dam, Kerala

Nov 15 to Dec 12, 2026
Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Nov 22 to Dec 19, 2026
Gudur, Andhra Pradesh (English with Swedish, Farsi)

Jan 10 to Feb 6, 2027
Neyyar Dam, Kerala

For more details, click here

Jan 3 to 16, 2027
Madurai, Tamil Nadu

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Jan 17 to Feb 13,
Madurai, Tamil Nadu

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Nov 15 to 29, 2026
Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Dec 6 to 20, 2026
Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Dec 27 to Jan 10, 2026
Madurai, Tamil Nadu

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Nov 8 to 22, 2026
Neyyar Dam, Kerala

Mar 7 to 21, 2027
Neyyar Dam, Kerala

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Dec 6 to 10, 2026
Neyyar Dam, Kerala

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Dec 12 to 19, 2026
Neyyar Dam, Kerala

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If a pebble in our shoe torments us, we expel it. Once the matter is understood, it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. Thoughts are the sources of all actions – they are real karma, real action. If, right at the beginning, you can root out all evil thoughts, you will not do any evil actions. You will be free from misery and anxiety.

Watch the thoughts with vigilance. Once the tossing of the mind vanishes, the mind will be very calm and you will get good meditation. Free yourself from the clutches of the mind, and liberation will come by itself. Those who have even a little control over their thoughts and speech will have a calm, serene, beautiful face, a sweet voice and brilliant, lustrous eyes.

Conserve all mental energy. Use it for spiritual purposes. Do not store useless information in your brain. Learn to unmind the mind. Then only you can fill the mind with divine thoughts. As all the dissipated mental rays are collected you will gain new mental strength. Useless thoughts impede your spiritual growth; obnoxious thoughts are stumbling blocks to spiritual advancement.

In untrained persons four or five kinds of thoughts occupy the mind at one time. These may be thoughts of the household, of business, of the office, of the body and so on. If you watch carefully you will see that many thoughts are inconsistent and that the mind wanders aimlessly.

Entertain only thoughts that are useful and helpful. These are the stepping stones to all spiritual progress. Every thought must be of a constructive nature; it must be positive and definite. Mental images must be well-defined. Every thought must bring peace and comfort to others and never bring pain or unhappiness. Then, you are a blessed soul on earth.

Always watch your mind. Be vigilant. Be alert. Do not allow waves of irritability, jealousy, anger, hatred and lust to arise in the mind. These are the enemies of meditation, peace and wisdom. Suppress them at once by entertaining sublime thoughts. Evil thoughts which have already arisen may be destroyed by originating and maintaining good thoughts, by repeating any mantra, by doing any good actions, by abstracting the mind and by enquiring, “Who am I?” or by will-force.

The psoas muscle is a deep core muscle that runs from the lumbar vertebrae through the pelvis and attaches to the top of the femur, connecting the legs to the torso. We use it for walking, finding stability in standing, maintaining good posture, and pretty much everything else. When it’s tight (perhaps from too much time sitting) it contributes to low back pain and can impact pelvic floor health. We do quite a bit of psoas stretching in a yoga class (think Surya Namaskar and Anjaneyasana, as well as many backward bends). A tight psoas may also make relaxation in Savasana difficult as it can cause the pelvis to tilt forward and the lower back to arch excessively. In this video we look at the pelvis in relaxation, and some other positions to help relax the psoas and release tension.

I hope you find this video beneficial for your practice and teaching. With best wishes for your sadhana! Pranams.

According to both Macrobiotics and Ayurvedic nutrition, each cooking method influences the qualities of food, digestion, and the kind of energy it imparts. The idea revolves around the fact that every cooking method transforms the energetic and digestive qualities of food differently. This happens due to heat, moisture, time, and cooking intensity used in different cooking methods, each transforming foods in a certain way with a direct impact on digestion and how we feel.

Energetics of Pressure-Cooked Food in Macrobiotics

In Macrobiotics, the impact of food on our body and mind is understood through the lens of yin-yang energy. Pressure cooking is generally considered a more yang-producing method, which produces more contracting, warming, concentrated, and grounding energy food qualities. High temperature, increased pressure, concentrated heat, and moisture held in a closed vessel transforms the food and makes it more penetrating, grounding, soft, and moistening for the body. People wanting grounding, warming, and more nourishing qualities in food find pressure cooked food satisfying.

Energetics of Pressure-Cooked Food in Ayurveda

Ayurveda approaches pressure-cooking through the lens of agni (digestive and metabolic fire), ama (incompletely processed or metabolised food), guna (quality of food such as heavy, dry, moist, hot, or cold) and samskara (transformation of a substance through processing). According to Ayurveda, cooking food under high pressure in a closed vessel produces food with the quality of heaviness. However, based on the dosha understanding of individuals, pressure cooked food may not be the ideal energy for some. For people with already high pitta tendencies, pressure-cooked food increases body heat, creating internal imbalances if over-consumed. People with kapha tendencies may want to avoid high pressure-cooked food due to the heavy and excessively moist qualities.

People with vata dosha may benefit from pressure cooked food due to the heavy, moist, soft, and warming qualities. Pressure cooking in general, within Ayurvedic understanding, can be beneficial for certain foods as it softens hard-to-digest legumes, improving their digestibility. Many beans and lentils, when adequately cooked produce soft, warm meals that may be easier to digest than lightly cooked food. However, excessively large, heavy or oily pressure-cooked meals can still burden the digestive capacity.

What does a building remember? Can stone hold the memory of a force that moved through it centuries ago: the direction of it, the intensity, the moment everything shifted?

In September 1555, an earthquake tore through the Kashmir valley and sent shockwaves southeast through the Himalayas. Towns were destroyed, and the River Vesha changed its course. And in a small hill town of Chamba, something shifted inside an ancient temple and never came back.

A pillar at the Laxmi Narayan Temple in Chamba, Himachal Pradesh, stands at an 8-degree tilt. It may have been that way since 1555, but no one knows for certain. There is no record of when and by whom the pillar was clamped to hold it in place. The pillar still stands at around 1.5 meters (almost 59 inches) high and features a carved human face.

Chamba is a small town in Himachal Pradesh, cradled by the Ravi River Valley, where the Laxmi Narayan Temple complex sits. There are six temples in a row, dedicated to Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva, built in Shikhara style: stones tapering upward, a wooden umbrella at the top and a sloped roof entrance designed to shed the heavy Himalayan snow.

The temple has intricate stone carvings and a mountain view from the courtyard. The statues of Laxminarayana, Shiva and Ganesha are made from marble obtained in the 10th century from the Vindhya range in Madhya Pradesh (over 1,000 km away). The temple also has artwork that depicts scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, as well as Krishna Leela (Krishna playing flute under the Kadamba tree).

Raja Sahil Varman, the founder of Chamba, built the main temple in the 10th century (Chamba State was founded in 550 AD by Raja Maru, who established the original capital at Brahmapur). Every ruler who came after added something. It has been a living, active place of worship for over a thousand years. It is the oldest surviving group of intact stone temples in Chamba, especially considering that the temple sits in one of the most seismically active regions.

The Himalayas are not still. They never have been. The mountains are still forming – two vast tectonic plates pressing against each other, building pressure over millions of years, are releasing it, without warning, in earthquakes that have reshaped this landscape again and again. The 1555 Kashmir earthquake was one of those moments- an estimated magnitude of 7.6, its epicenter in the Srinagar Valley, 200 km northwest of Chamba. The shockwaves extended further southeast than anyone realized, all the way to the Laxmi Narayan Temple.

A geologist named Mayank Joshi spent years reading ancient temples, the way a doctor reads an X-ray- finding earthquake history written into the damage of old structures.

What he found at the temple was not one damaged pillar, but a pattern written across the entire complex – buckled stone floors, cracked foundation blocks, multiple tilted pillars. He states earthquake damage has a signature. Old buildings crack randomly, in no pattern, and seismic waves travel in one direction, and everything tilts the same way. At Laxmi Narayan temple, everything that cracked or tilted or shifted told the same story- something enormous had moved through there and had left its mark. He concluded “This area has not experienced any major earthquake since 1555 and may have enough potential energy stored to produce a great earthquake in the future.”

Not everyone agrees. Roger Bilham, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado, points out that buildings of this age naturally tilt over centuries. A leaning pillar, he says, is not necessarily proof of an earthquake. Both perspectives deserve space.

What remains true regardless: one pillar was replaced; one was held, clamped, and is still standing and survived. It survived the 1905 Kangra earthquake – magnitude 7.8 – that left 20,000 dead.

The earth is not the only thing pressing on this and other temples. In the Himalayas, something has been shifting. The mountains are warming faster than the rest of the world. Glaciers are retreating. Rainfall that used to arrive gently over weeks now arrives violently in hours- cloudbursts, flash floods, landslides.

In July 2023, the Spiti Valley received a third of its entire seasonal rainfall in a single day. Just one valley from Chamba, the monks at the 11th-century Tabo Monastery, built around the same era as the Laxmi Narayan temple, wrote to the Archaeological Survey of India, warning that wooden beams are rotting and ancient murals are being damaged by water seeping through ceiling cracks. The walls are swollen with moisture. A thousand years of survival now threatened by what arrives from the sky.

This kind of pressure does not arrive with a bang. It creeps in – a hairline crack, a beam that slowly absorbs moisture, a stone that shifts a millimeter each monsoon. Year after year. Century after century. The ancient builders of these temples could not have imagined the weather that is arriving now.

We have just witnessed what this kind of pressure can do – in Nepal, in the Himalayas, in the floods and cloudbursts that have taken lives and homes this season. These are not abstract threats. They are here. And the temples – already carrying their earthquake cracks, their centuries of monsoon and snow are feeling it.

In yoga, there is a word, tapas; it means heat. The kind of heat that comes from sustained effort, from staying with something difficult. Not the kind of heat that destroys; the heat that strengthens.

The clamped pillar has been standing with its crack, not despite it. The tilt is not a flaw; it records what happened. The clamp is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign that someone cared enough to hold it.

Right now, in a season of floods and cloudbursts and mountains under enormous strain, it feels like the most honest thing we can do – hold what is cracking and don’t pretend that it isn’t.

Pressure is hardest to bear when it comes with an end date. Uncertainty troubles the mind, but knowing that an inevitable hour is drawing near, and still living each day with love and purpose, is a true test of the human spirit. The Mahabharata (Vana Parva) tells the story of Savitri, a princess who faced such a test and, in time, came face to face with Yama, the lord of death.

Savitri, daughter of King Ashvapati of Madra, was free to choose her own husband. She chose Satyavan, a prince living in the forest with his blind father, Dyumatsena, who had lost his kingdom. However, the sage Narada revealed a grave truth: Satyavan was virtuous and noble, but his life would end in one year. Her father urged her to reconsider but Savitri remained firm. The knowledge of what lay ahead did not make her turn away from the man she had chosen.

The months passed in the quiet rhythm of the hermitage. Savitri cared for her husband and his parents and grew accustomed to the simplicity of forest life. All the while, she knew how little time remained. As the appointed day approached, she undertook a three-night vow of fasting and vigil.

On the morning of the foretold day, she asked to accompany Satyavan into the forest. While he was gathering wood, a sharp pain struck his head. He lay down with his head in her lap. Then Yama appeared, solemn and formidable, and withdrew Satyavan’s soul. Savitri rose to follow him, and Yama asked her to turn back. Savitri replied with a quiet certainty that she would go wherever her husband was taken, for this was her eternal dharma.

Yama was moved by her words and offered her boons, asking her to choose anything but Satyavan’s life. Savitri first asked for her father-in-law’s sight to be restored, then for the return of his lost kingdom, and then for a hundred sons for her own father. These first three requests were not for herself.

For her last boon, she asked for a hundred sons to be born to herself and Satyavan. Yama granted the wish. Savitri then gently reminded him that such a blessing could not come to pass while her husband remained dead. How could she have children with a man who was no longer alive?
Yama had given his word and so, moved by Savitri’s devotion and bound by his promise, he restored Satyavan’s life. Satyavan awoke as if from a deep sleep, and the two returned to the hermitage together.

Savitri’s story is often remembered as a victory over death. But I find its quiet strength in the way she lived the year she had been given. She knew what Narada had foretold, yet she continued to care for her family, fulfill her duties, and share her life with Satyavan. Pressure did not make her hurry; it made her attentive. When the moment came, she did not let fear silence her. She listened, reasoned, and spoke with a clarity that even Yama could not dismiss.

Her story brings to mind the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita (2.47):

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥

You have a right to action alone, never to its fruits. Do not make the fruits of action your motive, nor become attached to inaction.
Savitri could not choose how much time she and Satyavan would have together. But she could choose how to live that time.

We all have moments when the future weighs heavily upon us: a difficult decision, an approaching separation, an illness, or a change we cannot prevent. It is easy to become so preoccupied with what lies ahead that we stop being present to the life we still have.

A question to sit with: Can you meet the days leading up to the moment you dread with a little more steadiness, rather than allowing fear to occupy them all? Savitri counted the days, but she did not cease to live them. And when the hour came, she did not surrender wisdom to fear.